By Sue Richards and Su Maddock.This report published by the National School of Government, summarizes the conference ‘Putting People First’ which was attended by over 300 senior public service figures.

One of the conference’s key themes was the need to recognise that much of the leadership of public service reform is taking place at the front-line, and at local government and local community level. Governments need to devolve power and resources from the centre to those delivering public services, in order to make improvement in those services self-sustaining. For this to happen public policy makers and managers will often have to work across the boundaries between different sectors, levels of government, and services. This has profound implications for the ways in which leaders are developed.

The chapters in this report offer an insight into the debate about how to improve public services in this country by learning from international experience. The report offers a range of perspectives on the issues, from high-level theories of reform through to some practical experiences of how to get things done on the ground.